Advances in cable-television technology and the Internet have provided consumers with innumerable venues for viewing content and purchasing products. Electronic commerce has become ubiquitous across the Internet, and made it possible to purchase everything from light bulbs to houses from the comfort of a living room. Further, cable-television offerings have expanded in the last 25 years from a handful of stations to hundreds of stations, including stations sponsored solely by consumer-product companies that offer product-specific content.
Cable-television subscribers have long been able to “purchase” products directly from their service provider. However, such purchases are generally limited by or to the content available directly from the service provider itself—e.g., movies and other content licensed to the service provider. The content is typically stored on the cable system servers and broadcast to the subscribers on demand. Currently, such video-on-demand (VOD) and infomercial stations do not facilitate the immediate purchase of consumer goods offered by companies other than the cable-television service provider. Further, such features do not allow users who subscribe to more than one service from the same provider (e.g., cable-television, Internet access, land-line phone service and cellular/wireless services) to initiate and subsequently complete commercial transactions using more than one of the platforms.